With the demand for quality, comfort and aesthetic beauty regulating vehicle construction and design, including a vehicle's interior, vehicle manufacturers have responded by decorating vehicle interior floor boards with a unitary piece of carpet having a size and configuration that covers the entire floor board of at least the front portion of passenger compartments. This “wall-to-wall” look can be pleasing to the eye but can also be expensive to replace, especially in instances in which only a small portion of the unitary carpet piece becomes worn such as when a driver's feet have eroded the carpet in the vicinity of the brake and accelerator pedals. Accordingly, floor mats are often placed onto areas of carpeting that are subject to the most wear, i.e., where the driver's and passenger's feet normally rest.
Floor mats of the type which are normally and popularly used to protect the floor board carpeting in an automobile and which can be removed for cleaning are generally made of an elastomeric material and, optionally, can have a carpet layer secured to the elastomeric material. Generally, such an elastomeric automobile floor mat is made sufficiently flexible to conform to the various shapes and contours of automobile floors.
Floor mats can prolong the useful life of vehicle carpeting but can, upon a driver's or passenger's entry or exit from a vehicle, skid or shift along the carpeting surface. This shifting can be hazardous, especially if a floor mat is pushed too far under an accelerator pedal such as to cause the accelerator to stick or otherwise become impeded.
Numerous attempts have been made to address the problem of movement of floor mats relative to underlying floor board carpeting. U.S. Pat. No. 4,425,690 to Fraser et al. describes a clip for anchoring a floor mat to the floor board carpeting of an automobile. U.S. Pat. No. 6,381,806 to Stanesic et al. describes a two piece retainer assembly having an annular collar and a locking cover coupler that are forced together to trap a floor mat. While suitable for maintaining a floor mat in a fixed position relative to the floor board carpeting, a drawback of these conventional devices is that a floor mat cannot be easily and quickly removed, cleaned, and reinstalled.
Another attempt has involved the use of strips of hook and loop fasteners, for example, a first strip having mechanically interlocking members (e.g., hooks) secured to the back of a floor mat and a second strip having mechanically interlocking members (e.g., loops) secured to a floor board or to floor board carpeting in registration with the first strip. In general, hook and loop fastening systems include a male hook member, having a plurality of upstanding hook engaging elements, and a female loop member having a plurality of loops in which the hook members become ensnarled to effect fastening engagement of the two components. Drawbacks with this attempt are that only a small portion (e.g., the corners) of the bottom of a floor mat is conventionally secured to the carpeted floor board, and the floor mat must be properly aligned relative to the floor board for the portions of the hook and loop fasteners to fully engage each other.
It has also been proposed to adhesively attach strips of the hook portion of a hook and loop fastener to the back or bottom of a floor mat for use on carpeted floor boards having loop-pile fibers so that the hooks engage the loop-pile fibers of the carpeted floor board to hold the floor mat in place. A drawback with this approach is that the hooks of conventional hook and loop fasteners are formed from a rigid material which can damage floor board carpeting when the floor mat is removed, i.e., the hooks can pull the loop-pile fibers of the carpet material and cause the fibers to break and extend above the remaining intact loop-pile fibers. Furthermore, in manufacturing such a floor mat, separate operations or steps are required to adhesively attach each of the plurality of strips to the back of the floor mat.